Superstorm Sandy didn’t just strafe the coastline with damage and suffering and wreak havoc on the economies of New York and New Jersey.

It also brought the cost of climate change into clearer focus.

That was the premise of a federal report that issued recommendations on how to deal with future storms based on the lessons learned from this one.

The Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force makes 69 recommendations, most of them crafted in the sort of policy language only wonks could appreciate. The report is heavy on touting the response to the storm, especially President Barack Obama’s role.

But investment in resilience is a constant theme:

“For every $1 we put into resilience and mitigation, we save $4 down the road,” said Shaun Donovan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in a conference call with reporters. The recommendations range from from holding a contest for architects, engineers, artists, planners and environmentalists on finding smart designs to funneling federal money to projects using cutting-edge science.

Many of the recommendations have already been carried out, Donovan said.

Rules relaxed

HUD’s relaxation of rules that prohibited New Jersey grant money for repairing and elevating homes going toward reimbursement of those with more than 50 percent damage was one of the examples he cited in how the task force has worked on one recommendation: cutting red tape.

When Obama set up the task force in December, he charged it with “identifying and working to remove obstacles to resilient rebuilding while taking into account existing and future risks and promoting the long-term sustainability of communities and ecosystems in the Sandy-affected region.”

Among the 69 recommendations, the task force report stresses the importance of green infrastructure, natural systems or engineered systems that mimic nature over purely manmade solutions. This isn’t a new direction. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been pushing green infrastructure.

The report cited the example of oyster reefs established a few years ago in Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. The reefs absorbed the energy from Sandy-generated waves and slowed erosion there, the report said.

Tittel welcomed the report. But he said the big question isn’t so much what needs to be done but whether it will be carried out. “A report without implementation is hallucination,” he said.

Donovan said there’s interest at the local level in things like using the best available science to plot future planning. It’s just a matter of getting the information to towns and businesses, he said.“We see that sort of hunger in the public and private sector,” he said.

But some of the recommendations are going to take legislative action to put in place, he said.

The report also recommends tuning up the electric grid with a new approach to operations, by using smart grid technology, microgrids (small, independent grids that can act like a contained system), building controls and distributed energy.

“This approach would ensure that problems can be isolated, surviving generation can be optimally dispatched (with priority to essential services), and that degradation can be graceful and not catastrophic,” the report reads. “This approach would allow building controls to provide a minimal level of service such as basic lights and refrigeration during emergencies.”